


Careful What You Wish For

by Cloudbustings



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Anxiety about kidnapping, Guilt, Healing, I’m only putting it in that tag so it won’t get lost to the void, M/M, Trauma, anxiety about missing peoples, mainly focuses on this unspecified person’s perspective, not a fix it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-12
Updated: 2020-03-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:14:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23115295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cloudbustings/pseuds/Cloudbustings
Summary: You have a coworker named Eddie Kaspbrak that you well and truly hate. He’s rude, defensive, aggressive, and overall an asshole.How will you come to peace with the man that is uncovered when he suddenly goes missing?
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 6
Kudos: 33





	Careful What You Wish For

**He’s brash.** He’s cold. He’s the fastest ladder-climbing risk analyst for businesses in New York, slicing poorly thought out decisions in two for high interest companies across the state and earning an exquisite six figures for his labour of passion. Clients call him a blessing in a business suit, a damn genius, and they directly cite his services as the reason for the increased turnouts documented in their annual revenue examinations. 

He also sits alone during breaks.

You can find him eating a ham and cheese sandwich and drinking the cheap bottle of lukewarm water he snagged from a vending machine when he first arrived at the office at the crack of dawn.

Edward Kaspbrak does not have a nickname around his office, because they’re adults and that would be absurd. But he does have a reputation, and the way that people sigh or mutter “Uh-Oh” when they see him rapidly approaching might as well be a nickname of its own. You know it’s not the kindest thing to do. It pulls some of the strings of your greater conscience to see him hanging out alone in the break room like it’s middle school again. Good God, is he really that unliked?

Well, you know why that is, and it’s not like it isn’t a reality hard earned on his part. And really, who would  _ want  _ to sit next to the man who told them they “Should have worked at Baskin ‘N Robins instead of the statistical analysis branch of IBM, because your client interaction skills are about as abysmal as a teenager working there earning minimum wage” So yeah. Screw him. Let him sit alone while he eats, like a  _ loser _ . No one puts Baby in a corner.

Sometimes he goes off on someone particularly hard and you come to work the next day hoping that he won’t be there. It’s really quite harmless at first, just the desire for him to catch the cold that’s been going around the office so he has to stay home for a day—or for the rest of the week. But he never catches it, and you start to hope he would just go missing, ‘cause he’s  _ good  _ at his job so he has no reason to quit, and the higher ups need him like they need the earthquake stabilising beams in this building, so they’d never fire him either. He remains glued to his seat every day, never late nor absent. Some say he’ll still show up for work after his death.

And he works long hours, too. He owns a fancy phone, but never checks it for texts. The clock is barely graced by his bovine brown eyes. The set of his thin lips is always a tense line. 

You know he has a wife by the skinny silver band on his ring finger, and you’ve wondered to yourself about a million times before what kind of woman would marry a man like him. In your mind you can see a face that’s long like his and crumpled with deep worry lines. She’s the tiger to his bear. The only person who can match his obnoxious neuroticism and bullying with her own. 

Perhaps he’s so good at his job because he’s thinking about all the risks of daily life every moment he’s alive, so much that you can physically see him calculating in his head what the statistical probability is of him dying on his way to pick up some coffee on the first floor cafe.

The afternoon falls and everyone is going home, but he’s still here. Your bag is swaying at your hip with the weight of a laptop inside. It slaps against the sharp jut of your hip bone when you stop and take a look at him. It’s one of life’s greatest mysteries—in your eyes—why he stays here so long. You watch him rub underneath his drooping eyes through the open doorway to his shared office. 

One side of the room is lovingly decorated with art from Anthony Mannibow’s children, nine and ten, of My Little Pony and Legend of Zelda fanart. There are tchotchkes at the top of his dusty keyboard and on top of his monitor. Kaspbrak’s side of the office hasn’t changed since he got the job. It even looks like someone had dusted and cleaned it in preparation for the arrival of a new employee, empty and blank in anticipation. It’s been a decade. Mannibow has been here for three years.

The thought of it brings a small plume of melancholy into your chest, and you allow it to settle there for a moment, heavy where it sits in your stomach, but only for a moment. You leave him tapping away at his computer and go back to your own life, your own problems, and forget about the miserable little man who is still, though miles away, typing up a report he took on to avoid going home any earlier.

It’s just life in that way, you think to yourself sometimes. You tell yourself it’s not bad that you hate him so much even though you can see he clearly isn’t living it up over there in his dark little corner of Hel. If he wanted his point of view heard then he would have made himself into a friendlier face  _ years _ ago. There are more important things in your life than throwing all your kindness at a man who clearly doesn’t want or deserve it.

And then that dreadful, fated day comes when your wish is granted. Your head is still filled with cotton, eyelids just beginning to feel comfortable with the open air and bright white sky. The office is warm and dry to contrast how humid it is outside. It’s only when you slip into a comfortable silence with Samantha Woodrow while eating your lunch of boiled eggs, carrots, and chicken cuts that you realise how quiet and calm your day has been. And you look around the break room. He’s nowhere to be found. Not making a pot of coffee and arguing with a colleague about something inconsequential. Not sipping his water and staring at the wall blankly like he’s in a daze. Not tearing out his expertly slicked back hair because the printer shorted out.

The rest of the day is good. Bright, even. Your boss snaps at you out of nowhere and where you would usually have bit your tongue until it bled just to keep from losing your temper and consequently your job, you just shrug and get back to what you were doing. It’s no biggie. Kaspbrak is gone. It’s no biggie.

Kaspbrak is gone again the next day, and it’s still no biggie. You treat yourself to a frappe after work and dream up scenarios about Kaspbrak laying in bed with a towel over his sweaty head, just as miserable as he made you feel. Being forced to listen as his wife goes on and on to him about absolutely nothing of interest until his rectangle head bloats like it’s been underwater for days and he just explodes from boredom and misery.

A week goes by, and you realise that while this is the most relaxed you’ve been at work since you started, it’s also not as entertaining. It’s fun speculating with Becky G. And Samantha W. about why Kaspbrak is gone, whether or not the office lovebirds will get over their own stupidity and finally get together, what the stick is that’s suddenly up your boss’s behind is about. But office gossip is not quite as fun as seeing Kaspbrak turn different shades of red and purple out of anger and frustration. 

Pretty soon, however, boredom and curiosity becomes confusion and concern. A week stretches into two weeks, two weeks into four, and the absence of Kaspbrak starts looking less like a refreshing break and more like a gaping hole in the workplace. You walk into the office at the end of the month and when you pass his office you find that there’s someone new sitting in his place. Someone from lower down who got promoted to fill the space left behind by the man before. And this time he’s imprinted himself on his side of the office in a way that Kaspbrak had never done.

The silence on his whereabouts becomes deafening. Did he get moved to another branch? Another city? Another company? It couldn’t be so, because when people move on in this company they receive closure. But there’s no closure here, it’s just an open wound. Why weren’t there goodbyes? Even half-assed ones? It’s almost like this wasn’t intentional. It makes it even more suspicious that your boss has nothing more clear to say about it than “Don’t be expecting his return.” when asked about the subject.

If it weren’t for the quiet, worried murmurs between coworkers, you would think he never existed. Privately, you wonder why you thought him being gone for good would feel better than this. Maybe it would have. If you could be sure he was gone for good in the technical sense and not...the other sense. You treat yourself to another frappe after work. This time it’s just to comfort yourself.

But frappes can only do so much for comfort. You know in your heart that a frappe isn’t going to fix this when you look at the two TVs mounted to the ceiling of a trendy bar & grill, and see the face of Edward Kaspbrak smiling back at you unblinkingly from both screens. There it is, in big, bright red letters underneath his neck. 

MISSING. 

Edward Kaspbrak.

  1. Male.



Last seen leaving for work by wife Myra Kaspbrak.

The female newscaster delivers all the necessary information about the disappearance of Edward Kaspbrak and how to contact authorities if any information on his whereabouts comes up. It all starts to sound like the adults from Charlie Brown mixed with high pitched ringing and rhythmic swaying from the room. Everyone is talking, eating, laughing, smiling. What is there to laugh about? How can you be happy right now? Can’t anyone see this? 

Your brain shuts off for a while until you find yourself wheezing in your car with your bloodless knuckles gripping the leather of the steering wheel, but it’s because you ran that your lungs are screaming for air. It’s been ten minutes. You’re just panicking now.  _ Fuck. _ You think this over and over again like a broken record.  _ He’s fucking missing. He’s a fucking missing person. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Shit. _

You go to work the next day and you can hear a backdrop of your own internal screams playing over everything you do as you do it mechanically and numbly. He’s not there in his office, because he’s missing. He’s not there in the break room, because he’s missing. No one can know how long he’ll be missing for. Some people go missing for eight months, one year, thirty two years. And that’s just counting the alive ones. Stories flash through your mind of people who went missing in famous cases. Beaten, hidden away in rooms, stuffed in suitcases, shoved in between walls. 

It dawns on you then. What you thought about a month ago. What you had wished for. Wanted to happen. Dreamt about. You wished that he would go missing. Your stomach drops so quickly that you have to scramble out of your cubicle and run across the office to get to the bathroom just to throw yourself down on your knees so hard they ring with pain through the bones. It’s easy to ignore the sting when your body is more preoccupied with emptying the contents of your stomach into the toilet bowl.

You sit over the bowl and retch for god knows how long. Kaspbrak could be anywhere. Anything could have happened to him. How could you wish this upon another person? Guilt pulses in your head and flows through your veins like poison, and even when you wash your face, your hands, and swill out your mouth with water, you still can’t be rid of the queasiness in your stomach or the filthy feeling of self blame that’s making you clutch your arms close to your chest and slouch as you slink back to your desk and try to pretend like nothing happened. Like it doesn’t eat at you, the thought that maybe somewhere out there Edward Kaspbrak might be alone and afraid, and you were the one that wanted him gone.


End file.
